On the ‘data stirring’ role of the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus

What is it about?

The hippocampus is essential to memory -- its loss causes people to lose their way in their own neighborhood, and to forget conversations from a few hours earlier -- but it does not seem to be the seat of the memories themselves. Instead, as is argued in this paper, the hippocampus creates the hooks used by the brain for bringing the memories out of storage. It creates large randomized groups of neurons, each of them linked up to a piece of episodic memory and activated, among other things, when the spatial location of its original storage is revisited.

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Why is it important?

The hippocampus has been linked to the storage of new memories and, alternatively, to spatial localization -- two seemingly contradictory concepts which are, however, both supported by incontrovertible evidence. Adherents of the two schools of thought have in the past viciously attacked each other on the pages of professional journals, and in fact the argument has never been truly resolved. My claim is that in this paper I succeed in resolving the issue, by presenting a theory under which the two views are fully compatible.